Heading Out to Wonderful (13 page)

Charlie didn’t brag about it. He wasn’t that kind; but you could tell he was satisfied, even though Will never said a word of thanks.

Sylvan Glass began to come into the store, on her own, after her husband had come and spewed his vulgarisms and gone off to Staunton, buying things they all knew she didn’t need or want. Sometimes she ordered almost the same things as Boaty, and what she did with all that meat was anybody’s guess. Two people, even if one of them was Boaty Glass, couldn’t possibly eat that much.

On one of these trips, Charlie picked up the package of wrapped steaks and chops and roasts and followed her silently out to the car. She seemed not only to accept his help, she seemed to expect it.

As she was getting into the driver’s side of her fancy car, Charlie opened the other door and placed the packages carefully on the seat beside her. “You know, Mrs. Glass,” he said, not knowing where either the words or the courage to say them were coming from, just knowing his deep and inexpressible need, “if you weren’t married, I’d surely make a run for you. So you be careful now, you hear?” He smiled at her, as open and honest and smitten as a boy.

Sylvan Glass, Mrs. Harrison Glass, turned to him and stared, her hand on the key in the ignition. She started the car, and once it had settled into its expensive purr, she said just loud enough to be heard above the machine, “Mr. Beale, I can’t immediately see what difference my being married could possibly make. And I am,” she continued, putting the car into gear, “always and ever careful with my heart. You be, too.” She put the car in gear.

And then they were quiet, looking at one another, not long enough to cause talk, just long enough to express what needed to be said, to be agreed to between them.

“Take care,” he said, closing the door as the car began to inch forward. When she was already moving off, and couldn’t possibly have heard him, he said, with a rush of blood to his brain, “See you soon.”

On one of his land-buying trips, he heard that one family, the Potters in Collierstown, grew the best beef around, and he started buying the beef over there, even though it was almost an hour’s drive away in those days. The Potters killed the meat differently from most farmers in the county. They never shot a steer in front of the rest of the herd. They would lead it gently into another pasture, walking just as slowly as it wanted, never rattling the animal, and then quietly shoot it once in the head, close up, before slitting its throat in one quick, clean swipe of the blade while the heart was still beating, so the cow never panicked, was practically bled out by the time its knees hit the ground, never shot those chemicals into its bloodstream that made the beef taste like fear and death.

Charlie wouldn’t let Mr. Potter cut the meat up for him, though. He always drove it back to the slaughterhouse and did the work himself. He always took his knives on Wednesdays.

On Wednesday, November 3, 1948, Charlie and Sam headed out to the slaughterhouse, the way they did every week. Sam still recited the names of all the residents of every house, and named every dog in every yard. When they got to the Glass house, there she was again, and Charlie didn’t just slow down, he stopped the truck in the road, outside of the closed gate, just staring up at the woman standing on the porch, smoking a cigarette and leaning against a post. She was dressed this time in one of her fancy movie star outfits, and wearing scarlet lipstick, red even from the road. She wasn’t smiling, or even looking their way; just standing, waiting to be seen, waiting for something, maybe even she didn’t know what.

After a full two minutes of this, they drove on. Charlie cut up the meat while Sam and Jackie Robinson watched from just outside the door, silhouetted in the bright fall air, behind them the trees the color of honey and amber and copper, even the mountains, so blue in summer, now burnt orange.

Then they loaded up. Charlie’s clothes were covered in blood, but he had scrubbed his hands clean as he always did, until they were smooth and clean as a woman’s.

On the way back home, when they got to the Glass house, the gate was open. She was still there, or she was there again, in a soft rose-colored dress, shining in the golden late-afternoon light. Charlie stopped the truck.

“Why are we stopping?”

“Just hush, Sam. Just be still for a minute.”

He let the truck idle for five minutes, just staring, until finally she turned her eyes to his and held his gaze. Then he drove through the open gate, stopped and got out to close it behind him again. Then he drove up the driveway and around to the back of the house. Sylvan came out of the kitchen door and just stood looking at him, saying nothing, not waving or greeting him in any way, as though both he and she belonged where they were, in that moment, the evening coming on, the fall crisping the air to a breakable brittleness that cried out for warmth and comfort.

He turned to the boy. “Wait here, Sam, Okay? Don’t get out of the truck. Just talk to Jackie and wait. I’m going to go in that house and talk to Mrs. Glass for a while. I won’t be long.” He pulled a pack of wintergreen Life Savers out of his pocket and gave it to Sam, knowing his parents didn’t allow it.

“If you bite down real hard, it’ll make a spark in your mouth. Don’t crack your teeth. Your mother will kill me.”

He got out of the truck and walked to the door, speaking out her name softly, over and over, Sylvan, Sylvan, up to the house where she stood waiting, never moving a muscle. They talked for a few minutes, no more than two or three. Charlie put his hand up to her face once, softly, the way Sam’s mother would lay her hand on his cheeks some nights when he was saying his prayers. Sam could see their lips moving, although he couldn’t hear what they said, the windows were rolled up against the chill.

Then they went into the house. There were no lights on, and Sam could see them only vaguely in the slanting light. They had hardly spoken, but something had been agreed to, had been decided.

The light had gone from gold to silver by the time Charlie came out and got back into the truck. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at the boy beside him. He drove down the drive, opened and then shut the gate, bouncing over the cattle guard, and then he drove slowly back toward Brownsburg.

He stopped the truck at the edge of town, and sat and stared at the road for a couple of minutes, looking at the lights of the known houses, the lives of people, dinners getting started, Brownsburg just coming into night. He turned to Sam.

“Make any sparks?”

“I couldn’t see any.”

“Give me one.” He placed the Life Saver carefully between his teeth. “See?”

He bit down suddenly, and a small flash of light went off against his cheek. “Now you.”

Sam put the last Life Saver in his teeth, exactly as Charlie had done, and felt, even if he couldn’t see, the quick spark as he bit down, and Charlie smiled. “See? A trick.” Then he just stared at the road for a while until he spoke again, and this time it was in a different voice, more serious, talking to Sam for the first time like a distant grownup.

“Sam. Pay attention now, son. We’re friends, right?”

“Sure, Beebo.”

“You know what a promise is?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“A promise is a secret that you keep, that you don’t tell anybody, forever and ever. You understand that?”

“Ever and ever.”

“Not even your mother and father. Understand?”

“I think about things sometimes and I don’t tell them.”

“Then don’t tell them this. Don’t ever tell anybody we ever stopped at that house today. Don’t ever say that you saw me talking to Mrs. Glass. It’s important, Sam. Promise me.”

“Course, Beebo. Promise forever and ever.”

“If you ever tell anybody, listen to me, if you ever tell, something really bad is going to happen to me, and maybe to Mrs. Glass.”

“Will you go to jail?”

“Maybe. Maybe worse. Just promise.”

“I promise.”

Charlie started the truck, and they drove back to the shop in silence, while Sam sat and tried to forget the thing he’d promised he’d never tell. By the time he got back into his father’s lap, he almost had.

He never did tell, never said a word until it was too late to matter. But in the hour that he sat in the truck, talking to Jackie Robinson, something had happened, something he didn’t have a place for in his brain yet, and, in the moments before he went to sleep, he thought about it, and he knew that he would remember everything, in every detail, the cold afternoon, the sparks from the Life Saver in Charlie’s mouth, the word wintergreen, the way she laughed as Charlie walked up the yard, calling her name softly, like he was calling Jackie off a possum, gently but with a kind of haste, the far-off sound of the screen door closing behind them on its spring as they went into the darkness of the house. And it made him feel both curious and lonely. Something had happened and he had been both a part of it and shut out of it completely, and it disturbed him and roiled his sleep. And he could not ask or tell. That much he knew.

Yes. Childhood is the most dangerous place of all. If we had to live there forever, we wouldn’t live very long.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HIS IS HERE,
he thinks. This is the only thing. This. This violence in the mind, this gentleness in his strong hands, moving slowly over her body, the kindness in her skin, the gratitude in his heart. That she would let him touch her, would open herself for him. Only this, the tremor in his skin, like wind across a pond, silver-scaled, a shimmering of nerve, a reddening of flesh, a slickness everywhere spreading from his shoulders, gathering in the small of his back, where her hands lie, still as a child’s.

Sixty years ago this bed, this place, this hour with the sun going down, cresting to redness and fading to lavender and then to blue, but here and now, never changing, never forgotten, never to be recreated. Always a making of something wholly new, always a loss of something valued, built up, kept to be given, a giving beyond money or work, a taking beyond greed or theft.

This chenille bedspread, these pillows beneath her head, encased in flowered cotton, her blonde hair fanning out like golden angels’ wings in a white garden, the down on her earlobes, her crimson lipstick smearing his mouth, his shoulder, his chest. Only this, and nothing else.

This secret coupling. These secret hearts and bodies, the child waiting in the truck, with the brindled beagle named Jackie Robinson. That would be the photograph of this moment in time, sixty years ago, if one had been taken, if one existed.

Nothing else. Only this stopping of hearts, and its opposite, that, too, the speed of the having, so waited for, so unexpected when it comes, then this rushing, rushing everywhere. He cannot have enough of her, cannot take enough of her skin at one kiss. His tongue tastes her perfume and her own skin beneath, washed clean, over and over, by his kiss, as she twists and churns beneath him like water, her breath sweet in his ear, choking him with desire, with the urgency of telling her everything, everything about his life and his heart and his memory, telling her not with words but with his body, with every inch of his skin, offered up to her with such hopefulness, with what he hopes is kindness but knows to be a kind of selfishness. Because she is, at this minute, in the chill, the only one, the only woman who ever lived, the only one he has ever touched, has ever told with his body all the secrets that were alive in his heart every day, the things he remembers, the things he has long since forgotten.

But this is here, this is now. This is the only thing, and she is not the first but she is the only, the only one, and every taste of her flesh is something new in his mouth, and every breath from her mouth a kindness he never expected and does not deserve. Right here, in this bed, on this chenille, in this sunset, these flowered pillows and her blonde, blonde body, the wilderness of his general desire becomes specific, the path becoming clear until it leads only to her, to here, to the two of them, wholly wanted and wholly belonging only here and only only now.

He is beautiful, now, like an animal in the wild. She is beautiful and wholly known and wholly foreign, and her voice is a new voice, and her breath is a strong wind that could blow him over, and her mouth is a new thing, her lipstick gone. How her eyes look into his eyes, dark as deep pools, the blue gone black, the depth unknowable, to ask, is this all right? Is this what you want?

Because her desire, her wanting, has waited, too. Because she is what she has always been, since she was a little child in a shack out in that valley, she is what she has been since before she was a woman. She is ready. For this, for him, for her movie star to come riding in the sunset, to her, to here, the smell of his sweat as sweet as rainwater, his hands smelling of blood, the sheen of his skin lit by the red of the sun and by his own blood rushing just under the surface, her Montgomery Clift, her Gable.

Now his arms are around her, his hands on her, his legs pinning her legs and she is Hayworth, she is Grable, the face and body a million boys took to war and dreamed about. She knows who she is, finally, because he knew from the first glance who she was and what he wanted her to be, and so she becomes that thing, here, his hands, his tongue, creating her out of whole cloth, the way Claudie’s deft hands made a dress from the flat of the fabric, she becomes something flared and ruffled and flounced and shimmering and feathered and winged, something silken that he can cool his skin against, that trails out behind her like the train of a bridal gown she has never worn, something made only for him and only for now.